Many ultra-high-net-worth portfolios have institutional-grade complexity without institutional-grade infrastructure. A portfolio worth CHF 100 million sounds liquid. But when CHF 45 million sits in private equity with unpredictable capital calls, another CHF 23 million is locked in direct real estate, and exit timelines keep extending, liquidity becomes the constraint.
The numbers tell the story. Family offices now allocate nearly half their portfolios to alternatives — private equity, real estate, private debt — according to J.P. Morgan Private Bank research. Knight Frank’s Wealth Report 2025 reveals that 23% of the average family office portfolio sits in direct real estate alone, with 37% of investments held for 9 years or longer. This allocation shift isn’t speculation or market timing. It’s structural. The search for yield in a volatile rate environment has permanently reweighted portfolios towards illiquid assets that generate superior returns but demand superior planning.
The liquidity squeeze is intensifying. PitchBook data shows approximately $4 trillion in value locked up in US venture capital-backed companies as of late 2024, with overinflated 2020-2021 valuations creating a backlog of companies that don’t want to exit at lower prices. Meanwhile, Cambridge Associates reports that managers called $46 billion from limited partners in 2024 — the second-highest annual total for capital calls on record. And McKinsey’s Global Private Markets Report 2025 reveals that 21% of investors now label distributions “critical,” a figure that has jumped 13 percentage points since 2021. When one-fifth of sophisticated investors describe cash distributions as critical, they’re revealing they were caught unprepared.
The old approach to managing illiquid portfolios offered two choices:
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- Hold excessive cash reserves to meet unexpected capital calls (accepting significant opportunity cost and return drag), or
- Improvise reactively when calls arrive (forcing liquidations at imperfect times with tax inefficiency).
BNY Wealth’s liquidity management framework acknowledges that families recognise “liquidity bucketing” (matching asset duration to liability duration) as the optimal strategy, but view it as too complex without proper tools. The gap is operational, not intellectual. Manual consolidation through spreadsheets and PDF statements cannot forecast what’s coming.
The UHNW Liquidity Paradox
The composition of ultra-high-net-worth portfolios has fundamentally changed. Where previous generations maintained significant allocations to liquid equities and bonds, today’s family offices have shifted aggressively towards alternatives. Consider a typical CHF 100 million portfolio with the allocation profile J.P. Morgan describes: CHF 45 million in private equity, venture capital, and private debt; CHF 23 million in direct real estate; CHF 20 million in public equities; CHF 12 million in cash and fixed income. On paper, this portfolio demonstrates sophisticated diversification and access to institutional-quality investments. In practice, CHF 68 million sits in assets that cannot be readily converted to cash.
The holding period problem has intensified dramatically. The traditional private equity model assumed 5-7 year fund lifecycles, with capital returned through predictable exit events. That model is broken. PitchBook’s analyst research shows that nearly 40% of US unicorn companies are now 9 years old or older, and these unicorns account for almost two-thirds of venture capital market value. Companies are staying private longer, investors are waiting longer for exits, and the locked-up value represents wealth that exists on statements but not in bank accounts.
Generational wealth transfer compounds this complexity. UBS projects $83 trillion in wealth moving to the next generation over the next 20-25 years. Multi-generational portfolios must serve different stakeholders with fundamentally different liquidity needs. Founding generation members are often focused on preservation and strategic deployment, next-generation members expect distributions for lifestyle or entrepreneurial ventures, and trusts have specified distribution schedules. Forecasting cash flows for a single investment timeline is challenging. Without comprehensive data consolidation, forecasting for multiple simultaneous timelines becomes impossible.
As wealth grows and diversifies into higher-returning alternatives, the ability to access that wealth on demand shrinks. Paper wealth and practical liquidity often move in opposite directions.
The Capital Call Conundrum
Private equity and venture capital commitments create contractual obligations that don’t appear on traditional balance sheets until they’re called. A family office might commit CHF 10 million to a fund, but that commitment gets drawn down over 3-5 years in unpredictable increments based on the general partner’s deployment schedule. Whilst distributions finally exceeded contributions in 2024 for the first time since 2015, this reversal remains fragile and heavily concentrated in top-tier funds. Most family offices continue experiencing net outflows to meet PE and VC commitments.
The unpredictability creates management challenges. Capital calls don’t follow smooth, evenly-spaced schedules. A family office might receive no calls for six months, then face three simultaneous calls totalling CHF 8 million. McKinsey’s research states that the exit backlog “won’t clear through market timing alone,” meaning families cannot simply wait for improved market conditions to ease the pressure. The calls will come regardless of whether public markets are accommodating liquidations or distributions are flowing from existing holdings.
Capital calls are contractual obligations, not optional expenses. Miss one, and you risk losing your stake entirely or triggering penalty provisions that compound the damage. The only viable solution is knowing calls are coming before they arrive — and that requires treating your consolidated commitment data as a forecasting asset.
Engineering Your Own Liquidity
Traditional liquidity events have largely disappeared. Initial public offerings that once provided clean exits for venture capital investors have been replaced by an extended private market holding pattern. Preqin’s 2025 Global Private Equity Report shows venture capital assets under management reaching $3.1 trillion, but growth is slowing dramatically due to exit challenges. A backlog of unsold assets represents a key challenge for limited partners seeking liquidity. Companies raised capital at peak 2020-2021 valuations and now face a choice between exiting at significant discounts or waiting indefinitely for valuations to recover.
In this environment, ultra-high-net-worth investors have stopped waiting for liquidity to happen and started engineering it themselves. Forbes analysis with the Arieli Group reveals that secondary transactions accounted for over 70% of all venture capital exits in 2024. Secondaries — selling limited partner stakes to specialised buyers before the fund’s natural termination — have evolved from niche rescue transactions to the primary exit mechanism.
But participating effectively in the secondaries market demands a level of portfolio transparency that manual consolidation cannot deliver. Secondary buyers require precise data: current valuations, capital account balances, remaining commitment amounts, fund performance history, fee structures. Family offices with data fragmented in PDFs and spreadsheets across multiple general partners cannot bring together this information quickly enough to capitalise on market windows. The secondaries market moves rapidly. Pricing windows open and close based on buyer appetite and competing deal flow. A family office that requires three weeks to gather documentation for a potential sale will miss opportunities that sophisticated peers with consolidated data platforms capture in three days.
When traditional exits fail, secondaries become the safety valve. But this valve only opens for those who’ve treated their private markets data as a strategic asset. Consolidated, validated, and immediately accessible.
The Forecasting Advantage
The Family Office Exchange identifies manual operations using spreadsheets and PDFs as creating “plenty of blind spots” regarding risk exposure and cash flow visibility. Without a central data intelligence function, family offices operate in permanent reaction mode. They discover capital calls when notices arrive via email. They estimate dividend income based on last year’s distributions without accounting for portfolio changes. They model potential liquidity from maturing private equity investments using generic industry benchmarks rather than fund-specific performance data. This approach worked well enough when portfolios were simpler and more liquid. It fails catastrophically with today’s allocation complexity.
Complete data consolidation transforms liquidity management from historical reporting to predictive intelligence. A properly constructed data asset doesn’t just show what you own; it shows what’s coming. With it, you can:
- Track private equity and VC capital commitment schedules with precision: how much remains uncalled, when drawdowns are statistically likely based on fund vintage and deployment pace, and which funds are approaching their investment period end (reducing future call probability)
- Project dividend income from public equity holdings using current positions and historical payment patterns
- Model potential distributions from maturing PE and VC investments based on fund lifecycle stage and comparable exit activity
- Visualise total cash needs 6-12 months ahead
This forecasting capability creates genuine strategic optionality. Consider a family office with CHF 15 million in outstanding PE capital commitments. The reactive approach is to hold CHF 15 million in defensive cash reserves. The opportunity cost is accepted.
If that same family office were enabled by complete data visibility, it might see that CHF 3 million would likely be called in Q1, CHF 5 million in Q3, CHF 4 million in Q4, and CHF 3 million potentially extending into the following year. Now the office can invest CHF 10 million in liquid strategies generating meaningful returns, maintaining only necessary near-term reserves. On CHF 10 million, the difference between 3% cash yields and 8% liquid alternative returns is CHF 500,000 annually.
Better tax planning also becomes possible. Sales to generate cash can be timed around tax-loss harvesting opportunities or structured to minimise capital gains impact.
Transforming Data Into Liquidity Intelligence
Institutions treat liquidity management as an intelligence function, not an administrative task. This approach requires a single, consolidated view of all holdings including non-bankable assets like private equity commitments, venture capital stakes, and direct real estate. It requires automated tracking of capital commitment schedules, distribution expectations, and dividend forecasts.
Proactive liquidity management therefore demands technology built specifically for forward-looking intelligence rather than backward-looking reporting. The Altoo Wealth Platform consolidates all asset types — including private equity capital commitments, venture capital schedules, and direct real estate cash flows — into a unified view that makes forecasting possible. Dividend forecasting and cash flow visualisation capabilities transform fragmented data into actionable liquidity plans. You get predictive capabilities similar to those that institutional investors rely on along with the simplicity and security that private wealth demands.
Contact us for a demonstration to see how the Altoo Wealth Platform transforms your consolidated wealth data into a proactive liquidity forecasting asset.
